landing

hassan could walk or swim if he wanted too.  just get to the port of entry with the landing docs (COPR, Visa, etc.)

As a general proposition, sure, if the Foreign National who is in possession of a valid PR visa can get his or her body to a Canadian POE, they can land, and how it is that they got there is generally their own business. Canada does not care. (Well, if they hijacked a plane, no . . . )

That said, however, even though a person is just in transit through an airport, many countries do not allow this unless the person has authorization (usually a transit visa of some sort, at the least, unless some sort of visa-exemption applies) to enter the country, even though, again, they have no intention of entering but rather just passing through.

For example, if the plane was scheduled to stop in the U.S., a transit visa would be necessary. The problem is not what would happen when the plane landed in the U.S. The problem is that without a proper visa or transit visa the individual would not be allowed to board the plane even.

If there is no problem for a citizen of Morocco to fly through Paris, there is, indeed, no reason to not take that route. But I have no idea what is required of a citizen of Morocco to transit through France (or any other country).

Funny, I was wondering why you thought that your husband may have needed to travel directly to Canada, rather than transit somewhere on the way.

You may have heard about a very old policy that Canada had, which was known as Continuous journey. Not one of the finest moments of Canada's history. In fact it was an explicltly racist policy. You see, in the past Canada was obliged to allow citizens of the British Empire to enter the country, but it did not particularly desire certain people to have that privilege (i.e. people from the subcontinent). So they created this "continuous journey" canard. The low point of this policy was the infamous Komagata Maru incident. You can read more here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_journey_regulation

Edited by drc - 26 Nov 2011 at 10:46am